This invention relates broadly to the art of games, and more particularly to travel-type games.
Several moderately-popular travel games exist to ease the boredom for travelers. For example, there is a game which employs a magnetic board having indicia imprinted thereon in rows and columns representative of scenes commonly viewed along highways, railroad tracks, or other travel routes. Magnetic tokens are placed onto the indicia as the scenes represented by the indicia are viewed by a player. This procedure is continued until a straight line of magnetic tokens, or some other predetermined pattern, has been completed. There are several difficulties with this, and similar, games which detract from their boredom-easing potential. For one thing, the indicia of a particular board is always presented in the same pattern; thus the same lines of tokens tend to form each time the game is played on a particular type of route--such as a limited-access highway. That is, one tends to see some of the items set forth on the board over and over while never seeing the other items.
Further, the above described game has limited value because some scenes depicted by the indicia are easy to find while others are extremely hard to find. The same difficult scenes normally form "stops" at the same board locations each time the game is played, which becomes somewhat monotonous.
Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide a "scene" tic-tac-toe-like travel game which employs indicia representative of scenes arranged in rows and columns, but which provides for the indicia to be periodically moved to new positions and to be easily replaced by different indicia entirely. It is a further object of this invention to provide such a game wherein the indicia can be easily chosen according to the difficulty of viewing the scenes they represent, whereby patterns of the game change often and the same "stops" do not develop again and again.
Still another difficulty with the above mentioned prior-art game is that it cannot conveniently be played fairly by adults against young children. That is, it is difficult to handicap adults in playing the above described game. Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide a game which allows adults to be easily handicapped so that the game can easily be fairly played between adults and children.
Yet another shortcoming of the above mentioned game is that it has little variety in that the basic rules of the game cannot conveniently be changed to play a variety of interesting games. Therefore it is an object of this invention to provide a travel game having a number of variations, all of which are fun and stimulating.
It is another object of this invention to provide a travel game which is uncomplicated in structure and relatively inexpensive to manufacture. Similarly, it is an object of this invention to provide a game which can be easily and quickly understood by both adults and children without the necessity of long written rules.